How to Motivate Your Team (Part 2)

 

By Lynda Bourne

In my last post, I delved into the SCARF model of cognition during a social situation. Created by Dr. David Rock, the model describes the five elements that can be a motivational reward or a threat to an individual: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness.

I tackled status and certainty in part 1 and now turn to the final three elements of SCARF.

Autonomy

Successful autonomy feels great! You have been given a challenge and succeeded. No one likes to be micromanaged. Even in jobs that require close coordination between a number of people (think of production lines), each person—and the group as a whole—needs to feel they have some control over their destiny if you want a motivated team.

The art of providing the right amount of autonomy to each team member is effective delegation. If the delegation is a stretch assignment for the person, make sure someone is available to provide coaching and support to make the learning experience enjoyable. Most people like to learn new skills but hate failing.

Relatedness

A feeling of relatedness is a primary reward for the brain, and an absence of relatedness is a primary threat. The feeling of relatedness is what you get when you belong to a group. Having many positive social connections (e.g., a sense of relatedness) doesn’t just increase your happiness, it can reduce your blood pressure and help you live longer.

The challenge for leaders is to create an inclusive group. Just as your brain automatically classifies situations into possible rewards or threats, it does the same with people, determining, subconsciously, whether each person is a friend or foe. People you don’t know tend to be classified as foe until proven otherwise—including the new team member. Careful planning is needed to build the team initially, and then to introduce new people into a team once it has formed.

How individuals relate is cultural. Some cultures and individuals are highly tactile and enjoy close physical contact—hugs and kisses on the cheek are part of the normal social processes (even in the workplace). Others expect and require more personal space. This is not a problem if everyone is from a similar background, but needs careful management if the team is made up of people from different cultures.

Fairness

Fairness can be more rewarding than money and is probably the only SCARF element that is almost impossible to overdo. The fact that being treated unfairly can generate a strong threat response is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone. What may be a surprise is that a sense of fairness can be significantly rewarding in and of itself.  

Fairness-generated emotions can run high even in mundane situations such as being short-changed at the checkout. The feeling of being taken advantage of can wreck an otherwise great day, despite the relatively insignificant money involved.

The tendency to prefer equity and resist unfair outcomes is deeply rooted in people, to the extent that they are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome.

It’s especially easy for people or teams to get upset by small injustices when they are tired. Therefore, leaders must ensure fairness both in fact and in perception. They need to do their best to be always seen as doing the right thing by everyone. This is no easy task!

Summary

All the SCARF elements crop up routinely in various theories of motivation. Dr. Rock’s contribution is to tie these factors back to the most fundamental processes in the human psyche.

When a leader gets the mix right, people’s pleasure drives are engaged, serotonin and other hormones are released and they feel good. If the settings are wrong, the limbic system switches to a threat response, which triggers a fight-or-flight reaction.

Either reaction occurs deep in a person’s subconscious and happens far quicker than rational thought. Therefore, the leadership challenge is to create the right environment for the team. Leaders must encourage the positive reactions that appear to lead to the creation of genuine happiness—at least in so far as happiness is driven by the chemical reactions in our brains.